It is kind of authors to provide details of the publisher, city of publication, and page numbers, for a publication, in the \u2018references\u2019 section of their paper. But we might ask, why? Stretch your imaginations a little, and it might occur to you that the answer to the question is \u201cso that you, the reader, can find the referenced item, should you want to read it.\u201d<\/p>\n
How often do you use the city in which a publication was published, to find a copy of a reference? How often do you use the name of the publisher? How often do you use the page numbers of a journal article or book chapter to find one? My answers are \u2018never\u2019, \u2018never\u2019 and \u2018never\u2019. I suspect that your answers are too. How do you find the reference? Google it!<\/p>\n
So, why, then, do authors put them in bibliographies? Because the people who are going to mark your essay, or edit or publish your book or paper, require you to.<\/p>\n
Why do they require it? I think it must be because they have not noticed the internet.<\/p>\n
Or if they have noticed it, and the radical difference it has made to how we find things, they have been too lazy to transfer that knowledge into their essay-marking or editorial policy. Each time I\u2019m told by a journal editor that I need to provide an address or publisher or page numbers, a little steam comes out of my ears. Sometimes it is a demand that cannot be fulfilled: where the paper is published online, there is often no relevant city, and page numbers are a side effect of paper publication so irrelevant to non-paper ones. It is very often unclear who should count as the publisher. But even where these details can be found, it serves no purpose to provide them.<\/p>\n
Before the internet had taken off, and stunning artefacts like Citeseer or Google Scholar existed, publication details and page numbers may have been needed in order that readers could find referenced items. But for the last ten years they have not been needed and any academic, publisher or university that has not taken account of the fact and changed its rules for bibliographies is just being stupid.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It is kind of authors to provide details of the publisher, city of publication, and page numbers, for a publication, in the \u2018references\u2019 section of their paper. But we might ask, why? Stretch your imaginations a little, and it might occur to you that the answer to the question is \u201cso that you, the reader, … Continue reading What bibliographies don’t need<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":378,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kilgarriff.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}